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Urban Forager | Amaranth in Abundance

By Ava Chin August 13, 2011 9:14 amAugust 13, 2011 9:14 am

Photos by Ava ChinHardy amaranth likes a nice Brooklyn tree pit.

I recently stumbled upon a hardy patch of mature, leafy amaranth, flowering in a tree bed in Williamsburg. The tree had long been uprooted, but the amaranth was in full force — one of the few green plants on the block. I was lucky enough to find some younger, reddish-stemmed specimens later that week while walking to my office on Staten Island. The very next day, I spied more young amaranth, this time growing through the cracks in a Park Avenue sidewalk.

Amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus), a.k.a. pigweed, rough pigweed, redroot pigweed, careless weed, or wild beet, is a tenacious annual that can grow as tall as six feet. It has a hairy, mostly reddish stem, with deeply veined, pointed leaves with wavy margins (young leaves often appear more blunted). This time of year, amaranth’s tightly packed green flowers rise up from the central stalk like baby green torches, which later produce numerous black seeds. The root is bright red.

Native to the tropics, amaranth thrives in disturbed and cultivated soil across the United States and Canada. I’ve seen it growing throughout the metro area on sidewalks and in tree pits, as well as on the grounds of college campuses and apartment complexes. Though I tend to think of it as a summer plant, amaranth grows through autumn.

Many Native American groups cooked Amaranthus retroflexus as a vegetable — sometimes storing it away for the winter months — and also grinding the seeds into a meal. It is high in iron, Vitamin B6, and folate. A. retroflexus is a wild relative of the amaranths that were a staple grain of the Aztec diet and now find their way into health-food cereals and the like.

The first time I saw amaranth, it was growing around an herbalist’s cottage in Woodstock, N.Y. We ate it raw tossed into a salad with other wild greens. Rather mild and spinachlike, it is also a variety of the plant used in some versions of the popular Caribbean side dish callaloo. Recently, a Jamaican friend told me about a traditional way of cooking callaloo — sautéed in oil, with chopped onions and flakes of codfish (a.k.a. saltfish), plus a pinch of salt and pepper to taste. I’m looking forward to trying my hand at it.

Special thanks to foraging experts Victor Weiss and Gary Lincoff for their help in identifying amaranth.

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